Site Structure: Is it safe to use Mega Menus again?

• What's the current thinking about Mega Menus? We're thinking of moving our secondary link structure from our footer to the top menu again with an expanding navigation system. However, we're concerned because it seems that 3-4 years ago, during the mobile-first upgrade, mega was strictly discouraged for SEO.

  So what's your opinion, should we make the move?

Answer:

Google's John Mueler recently commented on this topic saying that it's better to not get too carried away with linking directly deep into your site. He more or less indicated that it's better to link to topic sections / categories to make it easier for Google to understand the site.

The strategy we're talking about here is what they called Siloing. Here's a picture to help you visualize what I'm referring to:

We have a great article explaining it in detail here, Optimizing Your Site Structure for Top Search Engine Rankings + Siloing Strategies.

That said, we've got a number of sites with Mega Menus that are doing just fine on both mobile and desktop. If you decide to go Mega, you should do your best to make them look good on mobile and don't obsess over deep linking.

We've included the video of the Hangout where John Mueller spends almost 2 minutes addressing this issue below for your review and to give more context to his advice.

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